From governing with, or through, the family to governing childhood directly

For much of the twentieth century, based upon developments in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the role of the state was to support the family in the upbringing of children. Indeed, it was argued that family became the main instrument of government for ensuring the appropriate development of children.

It has become clear that the above is no longer so straightforward. Parton argues that, indeed, under New Labour, the identities of children and parents have been disaggregated, with children constructed as investments and parents, increasingly named as mothers and fathers, constructed in terms of carrying responsibilities. Whilst we would accept that this has been a key direction of policy and will explore this further in the next section, certain kinds of families have largely been left ‘alone’, either because they are able through financial privilege to buy their way out of engaging with any state services (schools, health and so on), or they have had considerable burdens placed upon them which they are assumed to be willing to accept with little, if any, assistance.

The construction of children as investments within a social investment state has received much attention from policy commentators and we do not wish to rehearse the arguments in any detail here (see, for example: Lister, Reference Lister2006; Jenson, Reference Jenson2009). Briefly, this approach marks a shift away from the old welfare state, which was considered to be inappropriately focused on protection from risks posed by the market towards an approach, which facilitates integration into the market. Social spending in the old welfare state was considered to be focused on consumption in the present rather than investment to ensure future returns:

The social investment state is future oriented with children a key focus of attention. Spending on early years’ education and care soared, from an admittedly very low base. A range of programmes such as Sure Start was developed. It is important to note that, whilst couched in an investment rationale, programmes such as Sure Start were unprecedented in their concern to offer universal non-stigmatising support within particular localities and to counter what was considered to be the distrust felt towards services. They were, however, set within a targeting approach that sought to identify areas where the risks of poor outcomes and social exclusion were assessed as high. Whilst there was a particular focus on early years, programmes for older children and young people were also developed.

An overall direction and coherence for the bewildering range of activities and policies was developed in Every Child Matters: The Next Steps (DfES, 2004). Examination of this and associated policy documents found few mentions of families and a limited number of references to parents and carers. The outcomes specified for children to attain were mainly based upon constructions of children as autonomous individuals rather than as human beings formed in and through relationships. This tendency to focus on children as the ‘objects’ of policy was continued in The Children's Plan (DCSF, 2007b) discussed further below. A key and extremely problematic development promoted by Every Child Matters was the further division of services into separate services for children and adults (Frost and Parton, Reference Frost and Parton2009). This organisational split (running through from central government to the point of service delivery) reflected an underlying tendency to conceive of relationships between children, their parents and wider family members as separate. This was exacerbated by the introduction of a bewildering array of service provision, often for time-limited periods and with very specific remits, into localities.

Alongside this focus on children, a parallel focus on parents was taking place with Every Parent Matters (DfES, 2007a). Here parents were placed centre stage with a language of family appearing very occasionally. There was a strong emphasis on supporting parents because of the hard ‘job’ they did and the new challenges they faced. New challenges were constructed as arising from changes in family structure, as indeed was the emphasis in the Home Office document Supporting Families in 1998. The changes are represented as happening to parents rather than activities that they are actively engaged in for a range of moral, emotional and practical reasons. The focus on parents may reflect an unstated assumption that notions of family are so complex and unstable today that the emphasis must increasingly be on parents.

In general terms, the emphasis on parents’ responsibilities towards their children has been well documented, encompassing not only child support and continuing contact, but also an expansion of their responsibilities in relation to ensuring children's conduct. The development of legislation concerned with parenting (such as Parenting Orders) reflected this drive towards locating responsibilities for a range of childhood behaviours firmly with individual carers.

Of interest is that until more recently there was no discussion of whether a language of Every Family Matters might be of relevance or helpful. However, a focus on families did emerge from the mid 2000s onwards and service provision built explicitly upon initiatives developed in 2003 when a number of Intensive Family Support Projects had begun working with families constructed as posing serious problems in particular geographical areas.

The White Paper which was to result in the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2004) argued:

The Respect Action Plan published in 2006 pushed policy developments further, promoting the use of specific projects modelled on the projects mentioned above. These projects sought to deliver highly targeted services to a limited number of families to address multiple difficulties and problems. The assertive nature of the services was coupled with intensive support and responsivity and the evaluation of these projects suggested that achieving change for the families was a complex and challenging process (Nixon and Parr, Reference Nixon, Parr, Barnes and Prior2008). Further developments in 2006 made it clear that there were limits to the local open access approach that had been taken by Sure Start. The evidence from the Sure Start national evaluation and from other, allied, evaluations indicated that the most vulnerable and marginalised of families struggled to take up the services provided by these preventative programmes (Edwards et al., Reference Edwards, Barnes, Plewis and Morris2006; Belsky and Melhuish, Reference Belsky, Melhuish, Besky, Barnes and Melhuish2007). In a speech trailing the Respect Action Plan, Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, made it clear that there was a need for targeting:

In both the Action plan and the speech by Blair, the explanations of the problems and policy and practice proposals were very similar to ideas promoted by Sir Keith Joseph about the ‘Cycle of deprivation’ in the early 1970s. As Frost and Parton (Reference Frost and Parton2009: 165) noted, the emphasis ‘seemed to be shifting to a more muscular interventionist stance towards those who seemed more “hard to reach” by the earlier programmes, particularly where they were perceived as being members of a hard-core underclass’.

Blair's departure and Gordon Brown's assumption of the prime ministership seemed to shift matters in ways that continued. Whilst The Children's Plan (DCSF, 2007b) appeared to signal the continuation of a language around children, the Plan did make quite explicit reference to families and, as noted by Frost and Parton, the introductory chapter was framed in terms of a discussion of family policy in the twenty-first century. There was an explicit attempt to locate policy and practice in relation to children in the context of family policy. For example, it was indicated that it would fund 12–15 Family Pathfinder projects.

Family Pathfinders were also highlighted in the Think Family policy stream consultation documents (SETF, 2008). The analysis offered by the Social Exclusion Task Force articulated the limits of segregated provision (by adult/child or by need) and argued for the development of family-oriented services to address the complex needs of families with multiple and enduring difficulties. Whilst tightly targeted in its focus (the supporting documentation argued some 4 per cent of families were cause for concern), the Think Family analysis of existing provision nevertheless revealed the complex configurations of services families needed to navigate.

‘Family minded’ practices

Against this complex backdrop of policies and services, the experiences of families with care and protection needs provide an illustration of the tensions and contradictions created by the policy discourses. Policy streams at times seek to support the role of the extended family and harness their potential to respond to the needs of children, and yet simultaneously question their rights and capacity to care. Two specific policy and practice examples reflect the broader policy push for extended family to engage in responding to care and protection needs.

Firstly, extended families are promoted as the potential source of resolution, where children are deemed to be at risk of harm from their immediate carers/parents. The current legislative framework for services and interventions for children in need of care and protection places upon professionals and agencies a series of expectations for the involvement of extended family members in care and protections processes. This move towards family involvement was initiated by the 1989 Children Act and has become increasingly visible as an expectation, as child care legislation and guidance has developed during the past decade (Tunstill, Reference Tunstill and Parton1997; Morris and Burford, Reference Morris, Burford, Barnes and Prior2009).

The recent implementation in England of the Public Law Outline (PLO) serves as a helpful example of this broader push for family involvement. The PLO guides the processes by which professionals respond to children in need of care and protection, where the involvement of the courts is a very probable next step (MoJ, 2008). Within this guidance is an evident concern with utilising the potential resources extended family members may offer a child. The PLO guidance expects social workers to have considered a process of consultation and discussion with family members, and where family members have failed to take up this opportunity, this information may well be placed before the court. There is little, if any, evidence of the development of tools and resources to support extended family members in their engagement with these highly interventionist state processes, but there is an expectation that they can and should contribute to the future well being of children within their extended network.

Recent indications from practitioners suggest that the PLO is being implemented in a patchy manner across England and that there are tensions between those services where family participation is promoted and the work of the children's services legal teams, who are preoccupied with the gathering of evidence and the meeting of relevant legal thresholds (Morris et al. Reference Morris, Masson, Dickens and Marsh2009). The evidence suggested that social work practice in relation to identifying kinship networks and understanding their resources and dynamics had shifted little, despite the policy drive to seek informal family resolution of care and protection needs. Nevertheless, there remains a strong ‘family first’ theme within current responses to children in need of care and protection.

Secondly, families are identified as the preferred option for child rearing when risk assessments indicate parents cannot parent safely. Current policies recognise the added value for a child in arranging for their care within their kinship network, and the practice guidance for child welfare professionals is explicit in promoting kinship care wherever possible for children whose parents are unable to care for them. During the development of the 1989 Act, it was argued that children's connections to their heritage, the development of their identity and the meeting of their emotional and social needs were best addressed within their kinship network. The Act moved away from an approach within professional practice that saw the extended family members as also unsafe where parents could not care safely, and instead began to explore the potential of the kinship network to care adequately for children. Subsequent legislation and policy has reinforced this shift towards family involvement and extended family care. The recent survey conducted by Family Rights Group of local authorities’ responses to family and friends carers suggests that many LAs are explicit in their position that this form of care is preferable to a placement with unrelated foster carers (FRG, 2009). But evidence indicates that this preferred outcome is rarely accompanied by adequate support – financial or non-financial. Family and friends carers are often offered reduced access to resources and the majority of authorities do not have a coherent, written set of policies for kinship carers.

Thus, for families where a child in their network is assessed as at risk of harm or in need of care, the messages are clear: they should be involved in the planning processes and they are the preferred option if alternatives to parental care are required. Whilst the practice arrangements to support these policies are less than robust, the message is consistently one of exploring the potential of the family first for resources to support vulnerable children.

There are, however, other messages for families emerging from a decade of New Labour approaches to child welfare. Whilst ‘family first’ may have become for a time a dominant theme for children in need of care and protection, a discourse has also emerged that positions families who need intensive state intervention as resistant and multi-generational in their dysfunctional behaviours. This analysis, as argued earlier, suggests that an indentified (and identifiable) group of families resist ongoing opportunities to promote children's pathways out of exclusionary processes and away from poor outcomes. The Think Family policy stream built upon this political analysis of failing families that required specific interventions. The evidence used to support and legitimise the Think Family policies showed that children from families experiencing multiple disadvantages were also the children who left care with little support and limited opportunity and were the subject of various youth justice interventions. Essentially, the families that require the ‘last resort’ state intervention are potentially, therefore, the same families that are being asked to offer help and accommodation when children cannot live with their immediate carers. This evidence of contradictory policy drivers is compounded by the research that indicates that families will be provided with minimal state support in taking on protective and caring responsibilities. Thus, there is a strong risk of failure by the family when they cannot meet (either financially or emotionally) the costs a child in need may present.

By tracing these strands of policy responses to families, the complex territory families may need to navigate becomes apparent. They may well be simultaneously a ‘failing’ family and a provider of care and protection. They will be asked to assume caring responsibilities, wherever possible, but without the provision of resources to make such care feasible – and the resulting placement breakdown will reinforce any pre-existing negative perceptions of family capacity. Steering a way through these policy contradictions requires considerable skill. Further tensions emerge when the resurgence of concerns about children's safety arise, as they did with the death of Baby Peter Connolly in 2008. In this context, commentators argued that the needs of some families were overly consuming of time and professional expertise and policies of early intervention and prevention had led to unnecessary risks being taken. The initial backlash faced by social workers as a result of the death of Baby Peter was accompanied by questions about the extent to which families, where children have protection needs, should be supported. For example, it has been argued that repairing families cannot be the primary, if rarely expressed, criterion for success. There has been too much emphasis, according to some observers such as Neary (Reference Neary2009), on ‘fixing’ families. Further, it is suggested that when the concern over Baby Peter has subsided, there will be a return to an unsatisfactory status quo in which social workers, who intervene to remove children from parents, face vilification.

The recent rise in applications to the courts for care and protection orders suggests that ‘family first’ is now less influential as a driver for practice. This rise of formal early intervention through the courts poses real dilemmas for child welfare practitioners. Namely, the law and guidance remains consistently in favour of family involvement, yet the prevailing political and social environment seeks to position vulnerable families outside of mainstream discourses and services, and resists their ongoing involvement in the welfare of their children. The specific examples we have explored suggest the need for a more integrated analysis and we offer a tentative contribution to this in the concluding sections of this article.